Greta R. Krippner

The political economy of financial exuberance

This article argues that the financial crisis has brought to the surface a series of dilemmas that have their origins in the declining affluence of the U.S. economy in the late 1960s and 1970s. When growth faltered beginning in the late 1960s, policymakers confronted difficult political choices about how to allocate scarce resources between competing social priorities. Inflation offered a means of avoiding these trade-offs for a time, disguising distributional conflicts and financing an expansive state. But the “solutions” that inflation offered to the end of growth became increasingly dysfunctional over the course of the 1970s, setting the stage for the turn to finance in the U.S. economy. Paradoxically, the turn to finance operated as the functional equivalent of inflation, similarly allowing policymakers to avoid difficult political choices as limits on the nations prosperity became more constraining. But the turn to finance no more resolved these underlying issues than did inflation, and as a result the recent financial crisis likely augurs the return of distributional politics to center stage in American political and social life.

The organization of disorganization in agricultural labor markets

This article examines the organizational prerequisites of competitive labor markets through an account of the restructuring of Mexicos export tomato industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Agricultural labor markets are typically taken as paradigm cases of competitive labor markets, the closest real-world approximation to the spot market of economic theory. Yet, this case demonstrates that such markets are deeply structured through the activities of producer associations and the state, suggesting that disorganization in a labor market can only be sustained through organization.

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present

The Spectacular State explores the production of national identity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. The main protagonists are the cultural elites involved in the elaboration of new state-sponsored mass-spectacle national holidays: Navro’z (Zoroastrian New Year) and Independence Day. The overall argument is that despite their aspirations to reinvigorate national identity, mass spectacle creators in Uzbekistan have reproduced much of the Soviet cultural production. National identity has been one of the most fraught questions in Central Asia, where nationality was a contradictory and complicated product of the Soviet rule. Although the category of nationality was initiated, produced, and imposed by the Soviet state in the 1920s, it eventually became a source of power and authority for local elites, including cultural producers. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up possibilities for revising and reversing many understandings manufactured by the socialist regime. Yet, upon her arrival in Tashkent to conduct her research on the renegotiation of national identity in 1995, Laura Adams discovered that instead of embracing newly-found freedom to recover a more authentic history, most Uzbek intellectuals, especially cultural producers working with the state, avoided probing too far in this direction. Rather than entirely discarding the Soviet colonial legacies, they revised their history selectively. Whereas the ideological content of their cultural production shifted from socialism to nationalism, many of the previous cultural ‘‘forms’’ have remained. Similarly, the Uzbek government continued to employ cultural elites to implement the task of reinforcing its nation-building program, thus following the Soviet model of cultural production. The book consists of four chapters. The first chapter delineates the broad themes of national identity building, and the remaining chapters explore mass spectacle creation by distinguishing between three elements: form (Chapter Two), content (Chapter Three), and the mode of production (Chapter Four). The study is based on content analysis of two Olympic Games-style national holidays, interviews with cultural producers, and participation observation of festivals and behind-the-scenes preparation meetings. Although Adams provides a few references to viewers and their attitude toward the public holiday performances, her book does not offer an extended engagement with reception and consumption of these holidays. The comprehensive and multi-layered overview of the process of revising national identity in Uzbekistan is one of the book’s major accomplishments. For Adams, the production of national identity is not a selfevident and seamless production forced by the state but instead a dynamic, complex, and dialogical process of negotiation between various parties (intellectual factions, state officials, mass spectacle producers, etc.). Her account reveals the messy and often contradictory nature of national identity production and thus moves away from the tendency to reify the state and its policies. The book makes a significant contribution to studies of nationalism by suggesting that the production of national identity in Uzbekistan was centrally constituted by the consideration of the ‘‘international audience.’’ Although public holidays, studied by Adams, aimed at fostering national identification, the forms in which these celebrations are performed (including national dances and music) indicate the aspiration of cultural producers to be part of the international community. This kind of national production self-consciously oriented toward the international viewer has been the legacy of the Soviet nationalities policy where all cultural producers had to produce art ‘‘socialist in content, national in form.’’ Notwithstanding the difference in generations or genres,

Polanyi for the Age of Trump

t is no exaggeration to say that Fred Block andMargaret Somers are almost singlehandedly responsible for reviving interest in Karl Polanyi’s intellectual and political legacy in American sociology. Their contribution has consisted not only in reminding sociologists of the power of Polanyi’s analysis of the rise of market society tomake sense of our troubled times but evenmore importantly in resolvingmany of the difficult theoretical tangles that Polanyi gets himself into in the course of developing this analysis. Now their various essays, written over three decades, have been revised for publication in a single volume, supplemented with several new essays that introduce novel themes and also attempt to apply Polanyi’s conceptual apparatus to current social and political problems. As a compilation of essays, the resulting volume defies easy summary—and I won’t attempt to offer a full treatment of the many important contributions that run through these chapters. An incomplete inventory would include the masterful exegesis of the complex argument of The Great Transformation presented in chapter 2; chapter 5’s valuable reexamination of the Speenhamland period in English social history; and a highly original, Polanyian-inspired consideration of free market ideology as a genre of utopian social theory, which is elaborated in chapter 4 but runs as a theme throughout the book. Alongside these contributions, I want to give special emphasis to two conceptual innovations that underpin Block and Somers’s entire analysis and I think represent their most enduring legacy to Polanyian scholarship: namely, their notion of the “always embedded economy” and the closely related concept of “ideational embeddedness.” But since my role as reviewer is not merely to praise but also to offer a critique, after introducing these concepts, I will take is-